Click on the image BELOW to hear my WHYY interview about teaching GOING OVER in the schools.

I was a child writer-dreamer who never strayed far from that path. Today I’m the award-winning author of nineteen books—dreaming my way toward more by night, while running a boutique marketing communications firm by day. I'm privileged to teach creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania, where I received the 2015 Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching & Mentoring. I love writing about the intersection of place and memory for the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER. I am honored to review literature for the CHICAGO TRIBUNE. Always and most importantly, I am privileged to be a mom. My work has been or is being translated into sixteen languages. All content Copyright 2007-2015 Beth Kephart Books.

One Thing Stolen

Parents' Choice Gold Medal Selection. Shelf Awareness Starred Review. Booklist Starred Review: "An enigmatic, atmospheric, and beautifully written tale." "Kephart at her poetic and powerful best. ONE THING STOLEN is a masterwork—a nest of beauty and loss, a flood of passion so sweet one can taste it. This is no ordinary book. It fits into no box. It is its own box—its own language." — A.S. King. Amazon Editor's April Pick. Top 14 Teen April Novel, by Bustle. Find out more about this Florence novel, due out from Chronicle Books in April 2015, by clicking on the image.

LOVE: A Philadelphia Affair

forthcoming, August 2015, Temple University Press. For more information, click on the image.

Going Over

GOING OVER is a 2014 Booklist Editors' Choice, the Gold Medal Winner/Historical Fiction/Parents' Choice Awards, an ABA Best Books for Children & Teens, 2015 TAYSHAS Reading List, YALSA BFYA selection, a Junior Library Guild selection,voted as a 100 Children's Books to Read in a Lifetime, a Booklist Top Ten Historical Novel for Youth, a School Library Journal Pick of the Day, an Amazon Big Spring Book, an iBooks Spring's Biggest Book, and has received starred reviews from Booklist, School Library Journal, and Shelf Awareness.. Click on the image for more information.

FLOW: Now available as a paperback!

"There is no more profound or moving exploration of Philadelphia’s history."—Nathaniel Popkin Originally released in 2007, Flow is now available as an affordable paperback. More on this book—the autobiography of a Philadelphia river—can be found by clicking on the image.

Nest. Flight. Sky.

NOW AVAILABLE through Audibles."... strives to give all those who grieve the hope that there is peace, a peace that we can live with and thrive with, as long as we remember to breathe and be alive." — Savvy Verse and Wit. Click the link to get your copy for just $2.99

HANDLING THE TRUTH: on the making of memoir

Winner, Books for a Better Life/Motivational Award. Named Top Writing Book by Poets and Writers. Featured in O Magazine. Starred Reviews from Library Journal and Kirkus, a Top Ten September Book at BookPage. For more on this book please tap the image.

Dr. Radway's Sarsaparilla Resolvent

Named a Kirkus 2013 Best Middle Grade Book of the Year. Winner of the Parrott Library Honor Award. STARRED Kirkus: "An outstanding and ultimately life-affirming tale." For more, tap the image..

Lamp Lighters and Seed Sowers: Tomorrow's YA

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Before my students set out across the campus with camera in hand today, they reflected, among other things, on these words from Beryl Markham, quoted in Vivian Gornick's The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative.

I know that I have a good class when the students are willing to disagree, are eager to look at shades and nuances, work their own experience into the equation. I have a very good class.

But what do you think? Does Beryl Markham, in this passage from West with the Night, speak for you? Or is loneliness not quite as abhorrent as she makes it out to be?

You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents—each man to see what the other looked like.